On this page you will find an alphabetic list of Internet terms and their definitions.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Adsense
Google AdSense, commonly just AdSense, is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis.
Adwords
AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution.
Ajax
(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), or Ajax, is a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications.
Alt Tags
An Alt tag is the small text box that is visible when a mouse is hovered over an image in a web browser, describing what the image contains. This is useful in search engine optimisation.
ASP
Active Server Pages is Microsoft technology that enables HTML pages to be dynamic and interactive and to draw information from a database. ASP is usually associated with Microsoft Windows Web servers and Microsoft Access Databases. ASP pages can be recognised as they have the suffix .asp
AWStats
AWStats is an open source Web analytics reporting tool, suitable for analyzing data from Internet services such as web, streaming media, mail and FTP servers.
Black Hat SEO
Black Hat search engine optimisation is usually defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner.
Blog
A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users' browser.
Dynamic or database driven website
A website whose content originates from a database as opposed to a static website whose content originates from page files on the web server. Dynamic websites are easier to update particularly when they are large. But they have the disadvantage that they may not be search engine friendly.
DNS
The Domain Name System is the method by which the Internet resolves a domain name (e.g. andaluciaws.com) to the IP address (e.g. 212.67.207.152) of the server where the website is hosted. Changing the DNS record is the method of changing the hosting of a domain from one server to another.
System to send and receive electronic messages. This is achieved using an email client program such as Outlook or Outlook Express or a web based interface such as Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. Email are usually sent through SMTP mail servers and received by POP mail servers.
Flash
Programme used (predominantly) to make animated or "movie" images within websites. Flash is developed by a company called Macromedia. Flash provides a slick professional corporate image but some users dislike having to wait to view information.
FTP
File Transfer Protocol. The common method of uploading web pages to the internet. FTP details are the host, user name, password needed to alter or add a web page on the Internet.
Gateway Pages
A web page that is created to be highly ranked in the search engines with the attention of leading web users to the main website.
The market leading Internet search engine. At one point Google boasted a market share in excess of 78% of all Internet searches (93% of the Spanish market). Google’s market share has dropped, but it is still the ‘big one’ that search engine marketers focus on. Google went public with it’s controversial IPO during spring/summer 2004. Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.
Hacker
Hacker has several common meanings. It is most commonly used by the mass media to refer to a person who engages in illegal computer trespassing.
Hit
A request for a file by a web browser to a web server. Since files include images and graphics it is a meaningless statistic from a marketing or point of view although hits are often quoted in website’s promotional material to enhance the number of visitors or page impressions.
Hosting
Space provided on a web server where information contained in a website is made available to those searching the World Wide Web. Andalucia Web Solutions offers a number of hosting plans. For more information please see Hosting Plans or contact sales by phone on 952 897 865 or fill in our contact form.
Html
Hypertext Markup Language. A programming language used in the construction of websites. It is really a mark up language rather than a full programming language. Static web pages are written in HTML.
Http
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a communications protocol used to transfer or convey information on intranets and the World Wide Web.
Inbound Links
An inbound link is a hyperlink that point to your website.
Internet (the)
The vast worldwide collection of computer networks that all use a common protocol called TCP & IP (Transport Control Protocol & Internet Protocol) to communicate. This evolved from the ARPANET of the late 60's and early 70's. (Can this be simplified for the average person who doesn’t understand the history or technical terms?)
Java Script
JavaScript is a scripting language most often used for client-side web development.
Key Phrases
When someone types a search term into a search engine, we refer to this term as a key phrase. For example, someone trying to find a real estate company may type “real estate Marbella” in the Google search box – “real estate Marbella” would be the key phrase here.
Landing page
In online marketing a landing page is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link.
Linux
A free version of the Unix operating system. Linux is “Open Source” software and is freely available over the Internet. It is primarily composed of tools developed over a 15-year period by Richard Stallman and Project GNU. However, the final spectacular push was provided by Linus Torvalds who wrote a kernel (completed in 1994), organized a bunch of programmers Internet-wide, and managed releases. It is known for its reliability and is popular choice for web servers. It is growing in popularity in office environment usage in spite of the higher level of technical support required. IBM has adopted Linux as a standard.
Live Search
Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search and MSN Search) is the name of Microsoft's web search engine, designed to compete with the industry leaders Google and Yahoo!. Live Search is accessible through Microsoft's Live.com and MSN.com web portal.
Lycos
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the web, launched in 1994. It ceased crawling the web for its own listings in April 1999 and instead provides access to human-powered results from LookSmart for popular queries and crawler-based results from Yahoo for others.
Microsoft
The world's largest vendor of personal computer software. Microsoft was founded in 1978 by Bill Gates and several others writing software for the emerging PC market. Success came with the contract to write the MS-DOS operating system for IBM, which did not see the future rival as a threat. Their present operating system Windows is now the world’s most popular operating system. A suite of programmes called Office and comprised of such well known products as Word, Excel, Access, Power Point, form the backbone of its software product range.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are a way for you to define your web page and web site to the outside world. You can declare the title, keywords and description, which help your placement in search engines. In addition, you can specify who owns the copyright, how often the page is to be visited by search engines and many other useful pieces of information.
MSN
Short for Microsoft Network, Microsoft's online service. Like competing services such as America Online, MSN offers e-mail, topic-related forums, and full access to the World Wide Web.
Open Directory
The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. Formerly known as NewHoo, it was launched in June 1998. It was acquired by AOL/ Time Warner-owned Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement.
Overture
Overture is the oldest, major, “paid placement” search engine. It distributes its listings to a wide-range of search engines, including that of its owner, Yahoo.
Open Source
Any software whose code is available for users to look at and modify freely. Linux is the best-known example; others include Apache, the dominant software for servers that dish out corporate web pages.
PHP
PHP (a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open-source, server-side HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. It is typically used on Solaris and Linux platforms.
Page Impression
Each time a page is viewed within a website. The number of page impressions a website receives in a week (for example) is the number of times pages have successfully been viewed.
Page Rank
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each page on a website. PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank) and later Sergey Brin, founders of Google.
Podcasts
A podcast is a series of digital-media files which are distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds such as RSS feeds for playback on portable media players and computers.
POP3
Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) is an application-layer protocol to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection.
RSS
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a XML specification for syndicating news and multimedia. It is usually referred to as a feed or an RSS feed and it contains a summary of content for articles published to the web site.
Search engine friendly
Compatibility with the way the various major search engines work. Without being search engine friendly, a website will be hard to find. A search engine is a business like any other; if it does not produce the results its customers need, then market forces dictate its customers will go elsewhere.
Search engine friendliness is attempting to ensure a website "does what it says on the tin" in the eyes of the major search engines.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords.
SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - A protocol used to send e-mail on the Internet. SMTP is a set of rules regarding the interaction between a program sending e-mail and a program receiving e-mail.
Text (search engine friendly)
When a key phrase for example "Marbella Property" is written into a search engine's search box, the engine will search for that phrase across the Internet. It is important to include text relevant to the business or service offered by a website, written in a programming language that search engines find easy to read.
Unique Visitor
A visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site in a given time period.
Webalizer
The Webalizer is a GPL application that generates web pages of analysis, from access and usage logs, i.e. it is web log analysis software.
World Wide Web
The large global collection of Internet servers which support hypertext documents coded in HTML, and transferred via HTTP. (Can’t this be said in simpler terms?)
Web 2.0
A trend in web design and development — a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services (such as social-networking sites, wikis and blogs) which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users.
Web Site
A collection of "pages" or files linked together and available on the World Wide Web. Web sites are provided by companies, organizations and individuals.
Yahoo
Acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle"; a www directory which categorizes web pages, it is one of the Internet's leading search tools. The business created by David Filo and Jerry Yang of the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University is now a major web portal, content provider and web based email account provider.